3. “Our brand identity
should resonate
with our philosophy
of inclusive growth
and resilience”
“We really like
Apple’s designs
and want to be
seen in the same
league”
“We want a really
simple website. It
wouldn’t take you
more than 3 hours“
Actionable Ambiguous Trap
The answer is in the question
(This deck is from a tech talk hosted at Tokopedia in April 2015.)
Hi!
In this short presentation, I share a little about my experience as a designer
I have been a graphic design intern, a graphic designer, a UI designer, a UX designer and a design manager.
Its safe to say that I have seen different facets of design, from hands-on to the business-driven-decision-making end.
In this journey, one of key things that I have learnt is that the design brief makes a lot of difference to how the entire design process is going to be.
I have seen various kinds of briefs and have managed to turn them into successful design exercises over the years
A simple & unambiguous brief led me to design screens for an iPhone app way back in 2008.
An completely last-minute and open-field brief allowed me to make an all Flash, no-restrictions promotional website for Levis. All interactions hand-coded by your truly.
An open brief with a lot of creative freedom made me explore a lot of directions, before settling to make a physical + virtual interaction experience, for a museum in Pune, India.
All prototyping, animation, design and testing was my responsibility
If I could share just one thing to anyone starting off with an idea or a business; that would be, “Start with Design”
I don’t mean ‘start by hiring a designer’, but start with an open mind, look at the problem in all ways rather than fixating on what you can build.
Design for a dialog for an in-game quest in a social game.
I wanted to increase engagement and fun-quotient here. The quest was for building an army-themed building.
I converted the artwork into usable form. And then made a few variants to do a quick A/B testing within the team.
The winning design used a dynamically placed soldier on a rope. I helped the developers build it and showed the artists new possibilities within the existing framework.
Moving forward, my team members always tried to improve designs beyond what they already knew.
I extended the concept further and standardized the quest windows for weekly quests. So that the artists could focus of creating the theme, rather than building the files from scratch.
A face lift to go with technology changes over time.
This is how the dashboard looked. It was Flash based and half a decade old.
I revamped it to be built on web-friendly technology, revised branding, no change of features/flow
And Responsive
Another one of my works involved developing an idea into a product from scratch.
I traveled to one of our call centers, where I interacted with the agents and learned a lot about their schedule, their day and the avenues for improvement.
Images from the visit and the learnings
Over a few months time, I worked with the PMs and the developers to turn the product idea into a successful product, guided by the learning from the field.
Its in Beta as of today with over half a dozen clients signed up.
This one is specifically for the designers and members of the design team.
The term guitar solo in a design context, is from a post on Speckyboy (http://speckyboy.com/2015/03/21/taking-the-guitar-solo-philosophy-to-your-designs/)
In a live performance, a guitar solo allows the artist to go crazy for a moment with their guitar, show-off their skills and come back to the plan. In a design project, the designer should find their own guitar solos so as to channel their creative energy, while continuing to be engaged with the larger plan.
I used avatars and gradients (outside of brand guideline) to channel by creative energy, during an otherwise cumbersome product development cycle
I secured third position in a Hackathon by building a idea prototype. It took me three days, but it gave a me a lot of satisfaction. May be some day it will be picked up by the team to be developed.
Another one close to my heart: A visual phonebook with an interesting alphabetically arranged contacts.
(it’s a wireframe and not the final design)
A sound-reactive identity prototype for a restaurant which hosts live performances along with good food.
Made in Processing. View demo here (only works on Macs) http://www.ghate.me/smoke.zip
